24 April 2014

I’ve blogged about digital posters from time to time, but I have yet to see or hear them done well. Das Terminal is apparently trying to position itself for the inevitable future of posters on screens instead of paper (hat tip to Peter Casserly). Here’s some of their screens:

I’m not sure of the industrial location they chose to photograph their product places it in the friendliest, or gives the impression of something contemporary or forward-looking.

When colors are paired with the concepts that evoke them, we call these “semantically resonant color choices.” ...(S)emantically resonant colors can enable you to take advantage of familiar existing relationships, thus requiring you to use less conscious thought and speeding recall. Non-resonant colors, on the other hand, can cause semantic interference: the colors and concepts interfere with each other(.)

Heh. Jon Tennant says, “Just decided this is going to be the layout for every future poster presentation I give”:

Empathy with the user! That’s the heart of Justin Kiggin’s great answer to, “Why do scientist still read PDFs of papers instead of web versions?” Because publishers keep doing this to their HTML versions:

It’s the logo problem all over again. Stop giving us irrelevant stuff.

“How do I choose the right font” is such a simple question yet there are so many ways to answer it. ... As a designer, you are (or should be) always paying attention to design in your environment and media. If you notice a cool typeface in something, like a movie poster or a billboard, see if you can track it down later using Google searches or WhatTheFont, so you can add it to your arsenal for future use.

For some weird, strange reason, academics seem to love Comics Sans. I don’t think it’s the right choice for most academic purposes, but, if you insist on that style of typeface, why not at least get cleaned up version of it? Presenting Comic Neue, a much improved version of the most maligned typeface. (I still don’t like the serif on the capital C.) Hat tip to Mary Canady.

17 April 2014

This following two posters come from a contributor who has asked to have identifying information removed from these posters. The creator of these wrote:

Coming from a design back ground, research posters have somewhat astounded me.

I think you can see the design sensibilities in these. There’s a lot more thought to typography, colour, and layout than I usually see (or do myself!).

First, we have a neighbourhood poster that pulls off some sophisticated grids (switching from 2 column to 3 column layout), has good use of icons, and interesting type choices.

I would be a little concerned if this was hung in a conference session where the light was low. Some features, like white text on the light blue background, might wash out if it was in dim lighting.

The next one is notable for me because I always find “portrait” posters (taller than wide) tricky. This one uses colour to make the reading order, in bands, clear. The muted colour palette is effective and appropriately calm (for a hospital poster). The drawing of the hospital bed combined with the large and evocative type used for “White noise” is an excellent entry point. Indeed, the “White noise” is an excellent example of the beginning typesetting exercise, “Make the word look like the thing is represents.”

My concern is that there is a lot of small text there. I would be deterred from stopping at it because of that.

It is a little hard to fathom that I’ve already been trying to make conference halls more beautiful, on poster at a time, for half a decade.

That I have made it five years, and kept the “one post a week” schedule steady throughout that time, is thanks to the readers of this blog. It’s my readers who convinced me I am doing something helpful here, and have given me lots of fodder to blog about. Thank you!

Picture by Gerry Dulay on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

10 April 2014

Jessica Hale tweeted this poster (click to enlarge) for the 2014 Northwest Student Society for Marine Mammalogy annual meeting with a request to make it, and I quote, “suck less”:

I tweeted these suggestions back to Jessica, which I have slightly elaborated on here.

A good design practice is to put things where the reader will need them. With only one reference, why not put it where the reader encounters it, in context: on the left column of text, instead of at the end of poster?

The “point of need” principle also means keeping related objects together. I like text describing results directly above or below figures, rather than all figures in one column. See this post for another example. Similarly, the statistical results could be put in the white space of the graphs, or in the caption, rather than in separate text in the results on the right, at some distance from the graphs.

Maybe the graphs could have same light blue background with no lines around them, so they would match the text boxes. This would mean picking the right colours for the graphs to match the blues. The figure in the left column might be a little more tricky to harmonize, but would be worth considering if it could be done.

Are the columns the same width? The right one looks narrower.

If you leave figures in central column, maybe you could consolidate the text boxes in the right and left columns into one box, not 2-3.

I wonder if you could have a stronger take home message. “Different otters are different” seems less memorable than you might like.

03 April 2014

But Alexis wanted something else to make posters. I asked if she had Publisher, often bundled with the same Microsoft Office package that contains PowerPoint. She did.

A problem with the poster above (similar to this one) is making sure elements sit nicely next to the curves. Just to give an example of how Publisher does this, I knocked out this example in a couple of minutes:

Here’s what I did. Inserted a text box with some dummy text. I inserted a picture on top of the text, and Publisher automatically flowed the text around the picture. The order is important; text won’t flow around objects underneath it.

I cropped the picture to an oval shape, and moved it away from the middle of the column. Right clicked the image and picked, “Format picture” and selected the “Layout” tab. Then I selected “Tight” as the wrapping style. And you see the results above.

It is still not on a par with pro typesetting; the large text size is creating some uncomfortable gaps. The text is ragged right; some of the jags can be smoothed out by justifying it:

Still not pro level, mainly because I can’t find any way to adjust the distance the text sits from the picture. For rectangular pictures, you can use “Square” wrapping style, and that lets you adjust the distance the text is from the object very easily.

But try doing something like that in PowerPoint at all. You will tear your hair out. Then...